Prevalence of burnout syndrome in Peruvian physicians and nurses, ENSUSALUD 2014

Objectives. To estimate the prevalence of burnout syndrome (BOS) in Peruvian physicians and nurses in 2014 according to different cutoff points established in the literature. Materials and methods. This was a cross-sectional and descriptive study based on the National Survey on User Satisfaction of Health Services for 2014 (ENSUSALUD-2014), which features two-stage probability sampling. BOS was identified by the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS) using different cutoff points to establish prevalence, including default values, terciles, and quartiles. Results. Of the 5062 health professionals, 62.3% were women, 44.0% were physicians, 46.0% belonged to the MINSA, and 23.1% worked in Lima. The overall BOS prevalence was 2.8% (95% CI, 2.4–3.2), when default values were used; the prevalence was 7.9% (95% CI, 7.3–8.6) when quartiles were used as cutoff points and 12.5% (95% CI, 11.4–13.6) when terciles were used as cutoff points. The prevalence was higher in doctors than in nurses, regardless of the cutoff point used (3.7% vs. 2.1% using default values, 10.2 vs. 6.1% using quartiles, and 16.2 vs. 9.5% using terciles). Conclusions. The prevalence of BOS in health workers differs within the same population when different cutoff points are used. The use of default values is recommended by the instrument author until specific cut-points for our country are obtained.